The future of international legal study in the Americas is the pioneering NAFTA Lawyer Program at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law (UDM). 

The Program enables bilingual law students to earn law degrees in both the U.S. and Mexico.  Mexican coursework is conducted through the highly-regarded Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM).  If the two degrees were completed separately, they would take seven and a half years to complete, but this program allows students to complete both degrees in five years.  Following graduation and passage of the applicable bar exam in the U.S. (Mexico has no bar exam requirement), students are qualified to practice law in both the U.S. and Mexico.  Ambitious students can obtain a third law degree from the University of Windsor, Ontario with an additional year of vigorous study. 

I am surprised that more law schools have not taken the initiative to develop programs like the NAFTA Lawyer Program.  The only other truly international legal study program I am aware of is the French/U.S. and German/U.S. legal study program at Cornell Law School.

Although it would have been great if Tulane Law School had a program with ITESM or another Latin American law school when I attended, Tulane’s civil law curriculum is outstanding and provided an excellent background for a cross-border legal practice involving Latin America.  The Louisiana Civil Code of 1808, inspired by the French Civil Code (the Napoleonic Code), was the first civil code promulgated in the Americas and it has had a significant influence on many of the civil codes of Latin America.